FRANKFURT—Depressed? Over-the-counter remedies abound, though some are hard to swallow. The 272-page “City of Thieves” by David Benioff, for example.

It is one palliative prescribed by Mano Bouzamour at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, where he sat at a desk sporting a white doctor’s coat and stethoscope. The Dutch novelist, who has no medical license, was serving as a “book doctor.” After brief consultations with people who lined up in the cold drizzle outside a pop-up clinic, he pulled out a prescription pad and scribbled titles to alleviate readers’ woes.

books

“You need ‘The 25th Hour’,” he told an enervated university student, referring to a novel by Mr. Benioff.

“Great story. Punchy dialogue. A drug dealer gets sentenced to prison,” said Mr. Bouzamour, who recommended any Benioff title to cure listlessness and the blues.

At the session’s end, he couldn’t resist recommending his own novel, “The Promise of Pisa.”

“This book cures cancer!” he said, adding quickly: “But I hope you don’t have such a problem.”

Mr. Bouzamour’s act is part of a growing movement among bibliophiles who put the “script” in prescription by treating problems with personalized book recommendations. Unaffiliated with bookstores, these consultants—often called bibliotherapists—talk to clients about issues and suggest books they think can help. Consultations and recommendations go for varying fees, usually excluding the books themselves.

“We genuinely believe novels are a powerful thing,” said Susan Elderkin, a U.K. bibliotherapist. “People can glean a lot from a novel that can stay with [them] in a resonant way.”

At a turning point in life? Her service suggests “Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett.

Frazzled? Keep cool and carry Hemingway.

“So many people come to us with stress,” Ms. Elderkin said. “We find ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ is a very calming read.”

Stuck in a rut? Rose Macaulay’s “The Towers of Trebizond” works wonders.

She and her colleague Ella Berthoud have counseled thousands of clients since 2008 when they started their service, which is connected to The School of Life, a London-based learning and development center. They have added three colleagues and seen an increase in people asking for training to be bibliotherapists themselves, Ms. Berthoud said.

Their recommendations go heavy on fiction with an occasional dose of nonfiction, usually autobiography or a memoir. They shun self-help books.

“Reading a novel can affect a deep transformation, whereas reading self-help is talking to your conscious mind,” she said.

Customers seek help with problems ranging from procrastination to bereavement, but Ms. Berthoud warns bibliotherapy isn’t for everyone. People facing extreme situations or deep psychological problems are referred to a psychiatrist.

“Bibliotherapy is a good alternative to a psychologist,” said César Ferreira, who runs a bibliotherapy service in Lisbon. Whether it can replace professional help depends on the nature and depth of the problem, he cautioned.

Mr. Ferreira designs goal-oriented reading programs to address professional, personal and learning issues. Among his go-to books is Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which he says encourages people to find clarity and purpose.

Tânia Montalvão, who consulted Mr. Ferreira when she wanted to reset her priorities, found the book “transformative.” Bibliotherapy seemed “a completely original idea,” she said, and the concept of using books as guideposts appealed to her.

The Book Pharmacy, based in Berlin, aims as much to bring readers the right books—like a personal librarian—as to tack an “Rx” to ex libris.

Founder Paul Leworthy said The Book Pharmacy dispenses a range of “detox” book bundles for people who feel like they have too much going on and need to take a break. There are “detox classics,” including epics like “The Odyssey,” and “detox-by-distraction” bundles of crime, romance or fantasy.

For stronger medicine, there is a “wellness” bundle that includes a day-pass to thermal baths outside Berlin with books “specially selected for their cleansing, soothing and revitalizing qualities.”

Caroline Donahue, a life coach who offers individualized book recommendations. Photo: Caroline Donahue

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In the U.K., even M.D.s are recommending books. The Reading Agency, a charity, works with health professionals and libraries to offer “books on prescription”—reading lists to help patients manage different areas of health and well-being. These are mostly self-help but the agency also assembles lists of mood-boosting books, including one it puts together with a cancer organization.

The Reader, another U.K. organization, hosts reading groups for patients with dementia and chronic pain. “We concentrate on literature—not in a snobby sense but in a sense that everyone can connect,” said spokeswoman Emma Walsh. She said some chronic-pain patients respond better to reading in groups than to cognitive behavioral therapy.

Caroline Donahue, a life coach based in Los Angeles, offers fee-based literary “prescriptions” of mostly self-help and nonfiction, and hosts a free podcast along with her website, The Book Dr.

She got the idea to combine therapy with reading while working in a bookstore after completing a degree in psychology.

“People would come in and really open up about their lives,” she said. “It was a good training ground.”

Kathryn Hellwig tapped Ms. Donahue when she was struggling with whether to follow a boyfriend to Italy, and later in dealing with the loss of her parents while tackling a writing project about living abroad.

For her, consulting Ms. Donahue was a kind of alternative therapy, but more targeted.

“I’ve had my fair share of counseling and it helped for a period of time,” she said. But “I’m not a person who wants to pay for years and years and years of it.”

Many clients come to Ms. Donahue with relationship problems, or “lack-of-relationship problems,” she said. The tribulations of dating are a recurring ailment.

“Dig into a thesaurus,” Ms. Donahue advised a man dismayed by online dating. A virile vocabulary would work like steroids on his profile, she advised.

Back at Frankfurt’s book fair, some visitors—mostly publishing professionals—were also invited to don the doctor’s coat. One of them, book blogger Lizzy Siddal, fielded a request for a remedy for depression.

Her prescription: Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure,” a downer from page one that grows darker, ending in a tragedy.

“When you reach that tragedy, you will feel that nothing in your life can ever be as bad,” Ms. Siddal said. “And you will cheer up.”

Sure, it’s a B-movie as lost in the annals of film history as the beautiful Bahaman lagoon featured in the movie, but it deserves a more widespread cult status. John Rawlins’ film has a perfect cast and is curiously watchable from beginning to end—more than once.

Protagonist, Charlie Walker, is down and out and in need of cash to pay his insurance premiums for himself, his wife and two kids. While on a fishing outing, where he lowers himself to ask for a loan from his successful brother-in-law, Millard, a storm blows in, and Charlie is washed overboard with $10,000 of Millard’s money in an envelope that fell on the deck-floor as the boat rocked in the sweeping waves. Presumed dead, an insurance claim is opened by his wife and two kids.

Millard characterizes his disdain for Charlie to Bernadine, Charlie’s wife: “Lost at sea? Truth is Charlie was lost at sea all his life. Only this time, it took.”

Experiencing luck more profound than death, Charlie is cast upon a remote lagoon on a small island—a Caribbean paradise. The island’s only inhabitants are a beautiful young woman, Liz Moore, who is about twenty years Charlie’s junior, and the staff of her failing resort which has closed due to being “under-capitalized,” as she characterizes her predicament.

In one of the more curious aspects of the film, Liz suffered a shortened tendon after an accident when she was much younger. She now walks with a limp as one leg is slightly shorter than the other. In a sense, she’s as much an outcast as Charlie.

Charlie thinks out the situation and soon enough has no intention of leaving, but of helping Liz restore the resort and of staying forever.

Liz asks, “But your home…your family?”

He responds, “Let them find their own lost lagoon,” and continues, “The biggest part of my life is over. I don’t want to spend the rest of it for the sake of the latest car model, for insurance, for a future to be buried in a king-size family plot. Oh no. I want to live it my way for a change…Is that wrong?”

He and Liz soon fall in love in the idyllic environment, which deepens his decision to stay. In one scene, Liz steps out on a limb, “Charlie…dance with me.”

They dance, embrace and soon are kissing.

As he is somewhat concerned about their age difference, she counters, “You think your age is a handicap, well I have one too,” referring to her limp.

In another scene, they remove their clothes and swim together in the lagoon, soon lying in the sand passionately in each other’s arms, leaving the question of whether they made love or not.

He changes his last name from Walker to Smith, emphasizing his evolving from one who walks the daily grind to one who is safely hidden in a sea of same-named individuals.

Should Charlie return to his wife and two kids and the daily grind that tears at men’s souls, or should he hideaway forever in paradise with Liz and the resort profits? Therein lies the rub.

Aside from the story, the film has a very curious tone to it. For one, Liz walks with a limp. For another, Bernadine, Charlie’s wife looks strikingly unattractive, in fact, wearing her hair in a shortened version of the Bride of Frankenstein’s hair. The camera lingers on certain scenes, abandoning the choppy scenes of life in the fast lane. In two scenes, Liz’s fingers sensuously knead Charlie’s bare back while creepy organ music plays on the soundtrack.

In another scene, Liz recites the last lines of Matthew Arnold’s lyric poem, “Dover Beach” for Charlie:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The film is structured around a strophic form with a recurring chorus provided by a Calypso band. The film begins with a dance and continues with the recurring theme of the dance of men and women as they work out their relationships. At one point, the Calypso band plays dance music while the words are sung, “Work all day / Sleep all night / Drink black rum / Get real tight / Me go home / Fight with wife / Never had such a happy life.”

It wouldn’t be a good film without a twist. Eventually, Charlie Walker is discovered by a diligent insurance investigator who tracks him to the island paradise.

Millard nastily remarks to his sister, Bernadine, “I should have known Charlie wouldn’t die like some ordinary guy…on the ground…in a bed.”

Charlie is forced to confront his wife, who tells him, pathetically, “I need you Charlie. I don’t want to be alone.”

Once again, the question arises: Should Charlie return to his wife and two kids and the daily grind that tears at men’s souls, or should he hideaway forever in paradise with Liz and the resort profits? Therein lies the eternal rub…

Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress

At Least 30 Minutes of Uninterrupted Reading With a Book or E-Book Helps

Members of a Wellington, New Zealand, club gather weekly to read slowly. Frida Sakaj

By

Jeanne Whalen

Updated Sept. 16, 2014 1:04 a.m. ET

Once a week, members of a Wellington, New Zealand, book club arrive at a cafe, grab a drink and shut off their cellphones. Then they sink into cozy chairs and read in silence for an hour.

The point of the club isn’t to talk about literature, but to get away from pinging electronic devices and read, uninterrupted. The group calls itself the Slow Reading Club, and it is at the forefront of a movement populated by frazzled book lovers who miss old-school reading.

Slow reading advocates seek a return to the focused reading habits of years gone by, before Google, smartphones and social media started fracturing our time and attention spans. Many of its advocates say they embraced the concept after realizing they couldn’t make it through a book anymore.

“I wasn’t reading fiction the way I used to,” said Meg Williams, a 31-year-old marketing manager for an annual arts festival who started the club. “I was really sad I’d lost the thing I used to really, really enjoy.”

Slow readers list numerous benefits to a regular reading habit, saying it improves their ability to concentrate, reduces stress levels and deepens their ability to think, listen and empathize. The movement echoes a resurgence in other old-fashioned, time-consuming pursuits that offset the ever-faster pace of life, such as cooking the “slow-food” way or knitting by hand.

The benefits of reading from an early age through late adulthood have been documented by researchers. A study of 300 elderly people published by the journal Neurology last year showed that regular engagement in mentally challenging activities, including reading, slowed rates of memory loss in participants’ later years.

A study published last year in Science showed that reading literary fiction helps people understand others’ mental states and beliefs, a crucial skill in building relationships. A piece of research published in Developmental Psychology in 1997 showed first-grade reading ability was closely linked to 11th grade academic achievements.

Yet reading habits have declined in recent years. In a survey this year, about 76% of Americans 18 and older said they read at least one book in the past year, down from 79% in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center.

Attempts to revive reading are cropping up in many places. Groups in Seattle, Brooklyn, Boston and Minneapolis have hosted so-called silent reading parties, with comfortable chairs, wine and classical music.

Diana La Counte of Orange County, Calif., set up what she called a virtual slow-reading group a few years ago, with members discussing the group’s book selection online, mostly on Facebook. “When I realized I read Twitter more than a book, I knew it was time for action,” she says.

Screens have changed our reading patterns from the linear, left-to-right sequence of years past to a wild skimming and skipping pattern as we hunt for important words and information.

One 2006 study of the eye movements of 232 people looking at Web pages found they read in an “F” pattern, scanning all the way across the top line of text but only halfway across the next few lines, eventually sliding their eyes down the left side of the page in a vertical movement toward the bottom.

None of this is good for our ability to comprehend deeply, scientists say. Reading text punctuated with links leads to weaker comprehension than reading plain text, several studies have shown. A 2007 study involving 100 people found that a multimedia presentation mixing words, sounds and moving pictures resulted in lower comprehension than reading plain text did.

Slow reading means a return to a continuous, linear pattern, in a quiet environment free of distractions. Advocates recommend setting aside at least 30 to 45 minutes in a comfortable chair far from cellphones and computers. Some suggest scheduling time like an exercise session. Many recommend taking occasional notes to deepen engagement with the text.

F. Martin Ramin/The Wall Street Journal

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Some hard-core proponents say printed books are best, in part because they’re more visible around the house and serve as a reminder to read. But most slow readers say e-readers and tablets are just fine, particularly if they’re disconnected from the Internet.

Abeer Hoque, who has attended a few of the silent reading parties in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she plans to read a book on her phone next time, but turn it to airplane mode to stop new emails and social-media notifications from distracting her.

When Ms. Williams, who majored in literature in college, convened her first slow reading club in Wellington, she handed out tips for productive reading and notebooks for jotting down favorite words and passages. Each time they meet, the group gathers for a few minutes to slowly breathe in and out to clear their minds before cracking open their books, as in yoga.

Roughly 20 to 30 readers have shown up for Sunday evening sessions, Ms. Williams says. Most new members fill out a brief survey on their experience with many describing it as calm, peaceful and meditative, she says.

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of this article neglected to give the first name of Meg Williams. (Sept. 15, 2014)

The following excerpts from [Callenbach, Ernest. Living Cheaply With Style. Ronin Publishing, 1993.] resonate with my own attempts at expressing who I am. One of my favorite words has become enough: “sufficient to meet a need or satisfy a desire; adequate.” Callenbach is definitely writing from within a specific political “box” (which is more than evident in later passages of his book), and I like to keep as far away as possible from partisanship, but much of his voice rings true for me. –SB

from: Living Cheaply With Style:

Dedication

To all who think for themselves and stay conscious of the choices that shape their lives . . .

To all who know in their bones that enough is enough, and want to figure out how much that is . . .

To all who understand that thrift, ingenuity, and resourcefulness mimic nature and help preserve the Earth . . .

To all who wish to survive with grace, humor, imagination, and a little help from their friends . . .

Introduction

The aim of the book is to equip you to live a better life–more relaxed, more confident, more resilient, more loving, more thoughtful, more satisfying, more genuinely stylish–than you could possibly have with a lot more money. It’s not easy to live in America today, and for many of us it’s getting steadily harder. But if we learn to live smarter and with less dependence on the money economy, we can tap a rich potential for sustaining healthy, productive, and happy lives–lives with real personal style. This book will both provide you with the knowledge and suggest the change in attitudes that can enable you to escape from the mental oppression of our commodity-crazed society, and to focus on what’s really important in life: our human relationships both inside and outside the family, our communities, our physical and mental health, our contributions to the world, and the infinite pleasures and delights life can offer that are not dependent on cash.

Style.

You live with style when you live in a self-determined and original way that is authentic for you, when you do things you enjoy because you enjoy them and not because you read about them somewhere or heard that somebody famous and rich enjoys them. You live with style when you keep your mind free to invent ways of thinking, feeling, and doing that suit you, rather than some corporate marketing department. You live with style when you rely on your own practiced judgment rather than somebody else’s pronouncements.

Thus style is a matter of independence, even rebellion; we’re not talking here about fashion, which is a matter of commercially fostered fads. America offers a paradoxical living environment, because on the one hand we praise independence of spirit, but on the other hand we are a nation of sheep in our consumer behavior, regularly duped by advertisers. In our commercial life and in our political life, we have become a nation of chronic liars. Living with style means turning away from lies, being your own person–though also realizing that as human beings we are social and sociable animals whose safety and serenity inevitably depend heavily on others. Part of the pleasure of living cheaply with style is to share your tricks and achievements with others, to build a counter-culture in which human beings can live more comfortably and satisfyingly, and to help make American life saner and more humane.